By: Joseph L. Schofer, Saeed D. Barbat, Rachel A. Carpenter, Grady T. Carrick, JANICE DANIEL, PAUL P. JOVANIS, FRANZ LOEWENHERZ, JEEVANJOT SINGH, BETTY SMOOT-MADISON, ROBERT C. WUNDERLICH, C. Y. DAVID YANG, and JINGZHEN (GINGER) YANG

The United States faces a road safety crisis: the fatal crash rate per mile traveled has been climbing for the past decade, and crashes involving vulnerable road users—pedestrians, bicyclists, and others who share the roads with motor vehicles—have grown the fastest. Minority communities have been disproportionally impacted. These developments are alarming, and especially so when considering that road safety has been improving throughout many other high-income nations. To assess the effectiveness of road safety research and its implementation, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) asked the Transportation Research Board (TRB) to assemble an expert committee to study the process for transitioning evidence-based road safety research into practice and to recommend process improvements.

The study committee expanded its interpretation of the statement of task to include the entire road safety research and development process, consisting of research project selection and funding as well as the conduct of research, the development and dissemination of guidance for practitioners, and the incorporation of feedback from the field to inform future research. The committee explored in detail the science of research translation in other fields.

In recent years, concern for the safety of all road users has been growing within transportation and public health agencies. The direction of road management is changing to be more inclusive of matters such as environment, energy consumption, and safety, albeit slowly because of the challenge of adapting a well-developed institutional framework and associated professional practices. For example, there is a trend toward balancing the needs of motorists, other road users, and communities.

This report uncovers important gaps and shortcomings in this process and identifies opportunities to address them. These include making road safety a true priority for action by highway agencies consistent with the Safe System Approach and its multi-pronged pursuit of zero road fatalities; breaking down silos between parallel research and action programs to build an integrated road safety strategy; and pursuing these ends through the collaboration of the broad, multi-disciplinary community of experts in such fields as roadway and vehicle engineering, public health and medicine, human behavior studies, and law enforcement. This will require a coordinated, disciplined, interagency effort by multiple champions working together to promote a renewed transportation safety culture across highway agencies.

Previous studies have addressed the road safety concerns central to this report, in some cases making similar recommendations for action. Those recommendations, by and large, were not pursued even as the country’s long-term gains in road safety waned and since collapsed into the current crisis. The coordinated set of actions recommended in this report is intended to achieve more impactful outcomes that can be sustained over time, as recent trends in highway injuries and fatalities can no longer be dismissed as temporary setbacks when their human, social, and economic costs have become so high. This committee, and its predecessors conclude that, with the right changes in strategy, well targeted and evidence-based research can be translated into practice and actions to make meaningful advances in U.S. road safety.

The following recommendations are offered with these opportunities in mind. All are directed to the U.S. Department of Transportation (U.S. DOT), urging the exercise of leadership in motivating, coordinating, and sponsoring—in effect, “rallying”—the involvement of the many parties integral to the road safety practice and research enterprises and to the implementation of research results in the field.

The National Academies Press 2024